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Having a highly successful product can often become a stigma that is difficult to break. One of the most used examples is that of the Acura Legend. The Legend was an incredible success during its market years in the 1980s and early 1990s and spawned an entirely new luxury car segment that would be imitated by Toyota and Nissan with their Lexus and Infiniti lines. To this day, the two door Legend remains a very desirable and collectable vehicle, especially with a manual transmission. However, in the early 1990s, the Legend was seemingly inexplicably pulled from the Acura line up. Acura’s reason was that the brand name had become secondary to the model and was a disadvantage for their other market segments.

We have seen this elsewhere, of course, with brand names swallowing company identity and pigeon holing people’s perception. You probably wouldn’t be apt to buy Lever 2000 tea, or Lipton soap, but the same company is behind both brands. Corsair made a successful transition from memory products to including AiO CPU coolers and cases, but not without some air coolers flopping along the way. Gelid Solutions burst onto the scene a few years ago offering a very nice fan assortment, but it was their top performing GC-Extreme TIM that became synonymous with the Gelid name. Slowly, but surely, Gelid has begun to expand.

The Black Edition CPU Cooler from Gelid Solutions shows a large step in Gelid’s involvement with the hardware side of the CPU cooling market. The Gelid Black Edition is a full-on 160mm tall, 990g dual tower cooler using two 120mm fans, with very impressive looks and design. To begin with, the Black Edition uses a slim fan up front to improve compatibility with larger MB components and pairs it with a high CFM low noise fan in the center of the towers to maximize airflow while keeping noise to an absolute minimum. Both fans are nicely finished in black and work well with the black brushed top making for an impressive in-case presentation. The aluminum fins of each tower have a unique, rippled shape in order to improve airflow while keeping noise to a minimum. The versatile mounting kit of the Black Edition is compatible with the latest Intel (775/1150/1155/1156/1366/2011) and AMD (FM1/2, AM2/3) sockets, and a Y-adapter for fan cables is included. With outstanding build quality, Gelid backs the Black Edition with a 5-year warranty.